CARH Broadcast Email—Regulatory Alert

January 22, 2019

We are now on day 32 of the partial government shutdown. CARH continues to urge Congress to reopen the government and then move to a solution to the immigration and border security that helped lead to this shutdown. At CARH’s Midyear Meeting next week, we will be addressing the issue of the impact of the shutdown on affordable and rural properties, residents, and companies.

On January 11^th we sent a broadcast email out to CARH members regarding availability of Rental Assistance (RA) during the shutdown. As mentioned in the email, RA payments for December should have gone out the first week of January. According to officials at the national Rural Development (RD) office, RA will remain available for contracts that were renewed before or during the CR which expired December 21, 2018. RD has been able to get permission to bring back additional staff to complete tenant certifications that were scheduled for January 20, 2019. Thus, January RA payments will go out the first week of February for those properties that have received contract renewals and tenant certificates.

Unfortunately, we have been told that approximately 700 RA contracts were not renewed before the shutdown. That means RA will not be allocated to those properties where a contract has lapsed because RD cannot make new obligations during the shutdown. Due to the shutdown and the limited staff that are working in the national RD office, plus some of the agency’s computer systems not being online, it is difficult to verify the numbers. Therefore, we are attempting to verify this number in order to further make the case before Congress that the shutdown needs to be resolved.

As a reminder, CARH is soliciting our members to see if any may be affected and will not receive RA payments in February or later. If you haven’t already done so, please answer the following questions as soon as possible:

• Did you receive an RA payment in January (this payment would have been for December 2018)?
• Was your RA contract renewed prior to the shutdown (December 22, 2018)? If yes, when you access your RA account through MINC, does it show that there is RA money remaining in the account?
• If your RA contract is due to expire soon, when will that happen?

(Please click here to answer via an online survey instead, or email carh@carh.org your responses.)